eleven GmbH is one of the European German-speaking regions' top providers of e-mail security and spam protection solutions.

Commtouch offered the company $9.2 million along with $2.1 million of its own shares.

After eleven settles in, Commtouch says it will be continuing its support for eleven's customers, partners and distributors. Despite the boost in its portfolio, Commtouch had another reason to acquire eleven: It wants to build relationships with people who worked up until now with eleven.

The acquisition will effectively allow Commtouch to tap into eleven's OEM and service provider customers and partnerships. As a consequence, Commtouch also gets its kudos in the market for cloud-based security solutions.

Although eleven is no big fish, it controls 36 percent of the German market and has an active and profitable operation. That's enough to get the attention of firms that want to inject themselves into a new market.

Shlomi Yanai, CEO at Commtouch, said, "eleven's proven cloud-based technology delivers tremendous capabilities that will accelerate Commtouch's strategy to become a cloud-based security-as-a-service solution provider for the OEM and service provider markets. Both the people and the products at eleven will serve a significant role in our continued effort to grow Commtouch by offering the most advanced and innovative security technology."

And why focus on the present when the future is what's at stake? Commtouch is obviously betting on the cloud market growing in the near future, and an Infonetics Research (News - Alert) report says Commtouch is right. The cloud security market is likely to grow by 83 percent from 2011-2016.

The report further notes that SaaS will be the most explosive cloud-based platform to take off in the cloud security market.

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